Agbese, Anya, Oloja, Ekpu Flay Hate Speech Ahead Of 2019 Polls

As 2019 elections draw nearer, some columnists’ yesterday unanimously condemned hate speech, insisting the media must be fair and non-partisan in its reportage.They spoke at the inaugural lecture of the League of Nigeria Columnists in Lagos, organised by Centre for International Advanced and Professional Studies.

Guest Speaker, Dan Agbese, who delivered the lecture on hate speech, said it does not just happen. It is incubated and given expression when social circumstances make the resort to it possible, even if inadvisable.

He said hate speech is a dangerous product of profiling, which is used in inter and intra racial and ethnic groups, even as profiling could be seemed to be a mild joke.

According to him, for anything to qualify as hate speech, it must be explicitly or implicitly directed at persons or group of persons who are different from in terms of race, ethnicity religion or sexual orientation.

He added that it is intended to cause social, racial, ethnic or religious disharmony and incite violence at persons, or group of persons; it must include verbal and non-verbal communication;

Hate speech, he added, must be calculated to injure or traumatise persons, or groups of persons for the purposes of causing the community in which they reside, to deny them their basic human rights and entitlements.

The Institute for Media and Society is an independent, non-governmental organization based in Nigeria. The institute was established in April 2000.
In establishing the organization, we considered and were convinced of such issues as:
the inter-relationship between the well-being of a society and its media as well as between the state of the media and the responsiveness and growth of societal institutions.
the institutionalization of democracy and development in Nigeria being nourished by a free and pluralistic media structure, culture and environment.